Damages of $2,500 per file establish a template applicable to any platform scraped from behind authentication.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works .
A U.S. federal judge on Tuesday awarded Spotify and the three major labels $322 million in a default judgment against Anna's Archive, but only $22.2 million of that figure came from copyright infringement. The remaining $300 million was awarded to Spotify alone under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's anti-circumvention provisions, a claim that doesn’t require the plaintiff to own the underlying works.
Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Southern District of New York entered the judgment after the anonymous operators of Anna's Archive failed to appear. The site had announced in December that it scraped 86 million files from Spotify and intended to distribute them via BitTorrent, prompting a January lawsuit from Spotify, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, and Warner Music Group.
The labels' direct copyright claim covered 148 identified works at the statutory maximum of $150,000 per work, totaling $22.2 million, split between Sony, UMG, and Atlantic, which is a small infringement case by major-label standards.
You may like Nvidia accused of trying to cut a deal with Anna’s Archive for high‑speed access to the massive pirated book haul Nvidia says it didn't use pirated books to train its AI models US Supreme Court says ISPs aren’t liable for their users’ piracy Spotify's award was calculated differently because the service doesn’t own the recordings on its platform, so it couldn’t bring a direct infringement claim. Instead, it argued that Anna’s Archive bypassed its technological protection measures, the authentication and anti-scraping systems that gate access to its audio files, in violation of DMCA §1201. Judge Rakoff applied the statutory maximum of $2,500 per circumvention to the 120,000 files Spotify's lawyers downloaded as evidence, producing the $300 million figure. Notably, these damages don’t depend on what Anna's Archive subsequently did with the files, but on the act of bypassing access controls.
This could set an interesting precedent, with any platform that gates content behind authentication now being able to argue that scraping constitutes circumvention under §1201, with statutory damages of up to $2,500 per file. Ownership of the underlying content isn’t required, nor is demonstrable harm or loss.
That may well have applications to AI training datasets. Anna’s Archive has previously called its data scrape a “preservation archive,” language that closely mirrors the justifications offered by AI labs for retaining scraped content. Nvidia is already defending itself in Nazemian v Nvidia against claims that it trained models on books sourced from Anna's Archive, with the plaintiffs' amended complaint citing internal correspondence in which the company's data strategy team allegedly negotiated for high-speed access to roughly 500TB of material.
That case is currently pleaded as direct infringement, and the Spotify ruling adds §1201 to the toolkit for any plaintiff whose source content sat behind authentication, which covers most of the commercial web AI labs have scraped.
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/annas-archive-fined-322-million#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
- News outlets are blocking Wayback Machine from archiving their pages — 23 outlets concerned AI companies might abuse fair use and use it to train their models
- Intel's promising upcoming Nova Lake-S lineup reportedly includes an iGPU-focused SKU with 12 Xe3P cores — new leak claims a midrange 16-core CPU with powerful
- From RTX to Spark: NVIDIA Accelerates Gemma 4 for Local Agentic AI
- Score a massive $700 off this 4K-ready Lenovo gaming PC with an RTX 5070 Ti, now just $1,899 — epic Legion Tower 5i pre-built ships with a 20-core Intel CPU, 32
- Iran reportedly bought an in-orbit Chinese satellite to target US military sites in the Middle East — purchase agreement included ongoing ground control service
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.